'How England once before the days of bale, Throned above trembling, puissant, grandiose, calm,

Held Asia's richest jewel in her palm;
And with unnumbered isles barbaric she

4. At the present day.

AS THE BOOKMAN goes to press, the daily papers are giving currency to a report cabled from London to the effect that Lord Salisbury has decided to appoint Sir Edwin Arnold to the vacant Laureateship. It is devoutly to be hoped that this rumour is untrue, lest the Eng

Then when she wound her arms about the world,

And had for vassal the obsequious sea."

the days of Nahum Tate have turned.

re

To appraise a living writer is at all times a difficult task. His proximity is disconcerting, and the very rheums and humours of the age which has fathered him must necessarily obsess the presuming critic. We should attain a little per

WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY.

spective ere we aspire to judgment; and, even so, remoteness argues merely a dispassionate desire of fair play, and is no warranty for a sure opinion. The incongruity doubles when one sets forth to criticise a critic, and to reverse or en

dorse his authoritative verdicts. Mr. Henley, in particular, is no person for this impertinence. Though it is as a poet he has the highest claim upon us now, and as a poet he will take rank hereafter; yet he has certainly made a

deeper mark upon his generation as a critic than any of his contemporaries. Mr. Lang, who once reigned paramount, has long since discarded his influence, and there is none left to dispute Mr. Henley's royalty. To few did name and fame come more reluctantly. It was not, indeed, until the foundation of the Scots Observer that he held any repute except among a handful; and even at the present moment his name sounds unfamiliar in the ears of the wide public. Yet he is beyond question the most formidable presence in English letters to-day. I am not here dealing with him as a poet, but merely as a critic of literature. As such, it is not too much to say that his authority has slowly undermined the prestige of the middle Victorian ideals. In a sense he is the foundation of a new period. That these words are none too extravagant is proved by his present position as the arbiter

of a distinct school of fiction. For one who is no novelist himself this is a considerable performance, quite apart from the merits of his influence; and certainly the achievement gives him a right to very serious consideration. By a number of

young writers he is regarded with the affection and reverence that a high priest might claim. He has ordered for them their notions of art, he has disciplined their energies, and he has even been able to impose upon them frequently the mannerisms of his own prose style. But the limits of his influence are not set even here. His ideals, his aspirations, and his code have penetrated elsewhere, and, if we consider gravely, are even now leavening the body of literary thought outside his Own immediate circle. The history of a movement is never the history of one man; but as it is Mr. Henley who has borne the brunt of the battle, and who has directed the strategies, it is to him that the credit of the revolution is largely due. Historians will some day find the present period of English literature of remarkable interest, not so much for its products, as for the conversion which has fallen within the last twenty years. The theory which is known as "Art for Art's sake" has been long preached to deaf ears, but the ears are opening, and in whatever regard it is held by lay minds, there seems little doubt but it will inspire and persuade the writers of the future. The great service which we owe to Mr. Henley is his very faithful adherence to this creed. He has consistently fought and suffered for it. He has spread the propaganda through every available channel, has trumpeted defiance at his opponents, and has been, of a truth, the veritable protagonist of this cause.

In this conflict two mental properties have served him-the one an absolute, even an arrogant faith, and the other a reckless courage. These, more than any other characteristics, as I conceive, compose the man's individuality. With this individuality he has been able to fling his influence over the young men with whom he came in contact, whether personally or through his critical writings. They browsed in the rank pastures of the old Scots Observer, and came fat and full to the market. They took colour from his phrases, and he pounded into them righteous views upon literature, by which alone they might be saved. There are few backsliders in the faith even after these several years, and a heresy-hunt among them would be fruitless. For the insistence of the man is intense, even in his writings, which might well have suffered from the dis

passion of cold print. If you would estimate his qualities as a critic, this fever of conviction must first be remembered. As I read him, his spiritual equipment for the task is both elaborate and singular. Soaked to his marrow in the literatures of the modern world-English, French, Spanish, to say no more he has rather absorbed them than they have engrossed him. Outside and above this gluttonous digestion is something wholly native to himself, in a manner insular, as distinct from mere Gallomania as Mr. Swinburne is distinct from De Musset or Burns from Béranger-something paramount and specific, the actual and individual essence of the man himself. In all his critical writings you may trace this almost barbaric effrontery, this baresark arrogance of personality. Mr. Henley is a stark man in all his professions, and starkest of all is he in his abundant passion for life. It is this which separates him by a whole class from the other critics of his time. They sound, if I may say so, niminy-piminy beside his stout voice. Not but what they have principles and creeds and dogmas to hold by, but these are less manifest, are not so frankly embraced, and derive from later ascendants. The combination of so primary a religion with such remarkable powers of mind is striking enough to arrest attention. The force and the sheer strength in Mr. Kipling I take to have captured Mr. Henley's sympathies on the one hand; while it is perhaps most of all the extreme artistic address which Mr. Stevenson brought to his work which attracted his collaborator in another instance. Finally, and to add a further incongruity, his appreciation. is extended to work which is merely fantastic and insubstantial, oftentimes the wildest imaginings of the Keltic mind. On the other hand, and to round this inadequate picture as well as may be, such work as Mr. Howells and his fellows expend their lives upon, is wholly antipathetic to him, as a dozen articles may witness. It is the accidents of passion, the natural phenomena of an unrestrained life—whether in act or emotion

that draw him. For weakness he has no mercy; an old maid's version of life is to him for a jest; a translation of human energy into the mild byeways and stagnant currents he can scarcely credit. Herein, as it seems to me, lies perhaps his great defect. His own